MOO Cards has partnered with Facebook to make what are simply dubbed Facebook Cards. Each Facebook Card is made from a template using your Facebook Cover picture and information from your profile.

From Wednesday onward, MOO will be giving away free 50-card bundles to the first 200,000 users. For those who struggle with math, that’s 10 million business cards.

A steady flow of free cards will be released, ensuring that the 10 million cards are not ordered within the very first hours of the promotion. For the next 10 days, 50,000 orders will be processed, followed by an additional 150,000 orders, says Paul Lewis, the head of marketing at MOO. Those first 50,000 will also have free shipping, but the rest will have a “small” shipping fee, so act fast. The promotion’s end date hasn’t yet been determined.

Seats are filling up fast, register today!

Click the button below, and provide your name, contact information and training date you’re registering for in the fields provided with your payment.

To see scheduled trainings, or to request a new training (5 person minimum), click here.

Be transparent and authentic. Be human.

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Don’t want the worst day of your life to be played over and over again like Groundhog Day? Then don’t talk, share, Tweet or write about it via social media. That said, no one is happy, or perfect all of the time. It’s okay to let people into the “real” events which happen in your life. Social media for business is about return on engagement. Connect with people, build opportunities through dialogue which would not have otherwise occurred, then connect them with your business.

Think in terms of “bad driver just cut me off” instead of “just got served papers for a lawsuit.” The first example connects people and encourages dialogue. Who hasn’t been cut off by a bad driver? The second example has the potential to make people uncomfortable or turn them “off” to your brand.

A great example of “what not to do” is posted on Peter Shankman’s blog, How an “accomplished communicator” communicates. The sender of this email has now publicly shared a not-so-nice side of his personality in a VERY public setting.

Read the entire article here.

Most companies will expend a great deal of effort on their external marketing. This often includes collecting reams of research in an effort to develop intimate portraits of their target audiences. They’ll spend big bucks to gain insights into the lifestyles, attitudes, perceptions, needs, and wants that inform their prospects’ purchase decisions. Then they’ll spend even bigger bucks to leverage that knowledge into external marketing programs to attract an ever-larger number of customers

There’s just one problem. After all that effort, most companies effectively file away all that wonderful information somewhere in the vault of the marketing department. Then they wring their hands when their employees don’t deliver as promised.

The article points to a recent internal effort by Starbucks to make employee training on company brand and service a national event.  It drew the media attention of a traditional press event (leading some to call it a publicity stunt), but the author here argues it was simply smart business.  It gave them the opportunity to not only focus on internal employees — as any business has to do from time to time — and service guidelines, but also tied their internal branding to their external in the public eye.

Read the entire article here.

A functional website

Is your website up-to-date and a true reflection of your business strengths? Do your customers get value from it? Does it actively get results for your business? If not, then you are missing out on the value that many businesses are gaining from the internet. Find a developer that can identify what will work for your business online. They need to supply you with a simple content management system so you can easily update the site yourself, a variety of features like a shopping cart and a photo gallery that can be added to the site at any time and, most importantly, reliable ongoing support.

Email marketing

According to the Direct Marketing Association, email marketing has a return on investment of almost $50 for every dollar spent. It is a must-have for anyone that is serious about growing their business, particularly in these quiet times because it is so cost-effective. Newsletters, promotions, event invitations, welcome letters and numerous other strategies work really well with email marketing because it’s highly targeted, personalised and easy to measure results. Look for an email marketing system that can integrate with your website and has in-built spam compliance and reporting capabilities.

Google Analytics

Ever wondered how many people come to your site and where they come from? Your site should generate basic statistics on its own, but you can find that out a lot more with Google Analytics. To set it up, simply sign up for a free account, put the tracking code on your website and you’re good to go. Analytics measures how many visits your site gets, how long users spend there, what pages they look at and much more. You can also also set up ‘goals’ to find out how many achieve a certain objective on the site, such as buy something or fill out your contact form. Visit www.google.com/analytics for more information.

Facebook

Facebook was a country, it would have the world’s 8th largest population, with more than 150 million members, so it’s definitely worth getting your business on it. Set up a profile for your business and use it to communicate with your customers in a creative way – promote your products, list your events, upload pictures and create online discussions. There are also paid advertising options on Facebook as well, which can be a very valuable option if your target consumers are social networking users. Being on Facebook will be one of the biggest marketing trends of the year, so jump on board now. Check out www.facebook.com for more information.